


I Sung of Chaos and Eternal Night

by fried_flamingo



Category: Supernatural
Genre: Angst, Coda, Episode Related, Episode: s11e21 All In The Family, Kissing, M/M, Missing Scene
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2016-05-22
Updated: 2016-05-22
Packaged: 2018-06-10 01:04:50
Rating: Not Rated
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,693
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/6931612
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/fried_flamingo/pseuds/fried_flamingo
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>He walks to the edge of the balcony, wrapping his hands around the metal rail until his bones threaten to burst through the skin.  He knows that, despite his rapidly approaching sobriety, he looks like a man on the final kick of a bender.  Sam’s eyebrows quirk in that familiar expression of concern, while Chuck watches him with a benevolence that makes him want to hurl.  The other one doesn’t look at him at all.  His head is bowed towards the table as he idly traces the lines of the map with his finger, like he’s pretending he hasn’t even registered Dean’s presence.</p>
            </blockquote>





	I Sung of Chaos and Eternal Night

‘I sung of Chaos and Eternal Night,  
Taught by the heav'nly Muse to venture down  
The dark descent, and up to reascend...’  
\- _Paradise Lost, Book 3_  


Dean’s route back to the bunker takes in three bars, five beers and around nine fingers of cheap scotch. On any other occasion, he would’ve told himself that he just wanted a drink; no need for questions or scrutiny. But his encounter with Amara has opened up the scar tissue that masked those secrets he’s used to burying deep. He’s found, suddenly, that his skills at self-denial have been eroded. It’s fear that stops him from going home.

Before putting Donatello in a cab, Sam had filled Dean in on the outcome of their plan. Metatron had proven to be not so much of a dick after all and had helped them escape the silo, they’d managed to give Amara the slip (the part about Baby ending up inside the bunker still needs further explaining), and, most importantly, they’d rescued Lucifer. It’s the latter success that had Dean waving Sam off on the assurance that he’d be home soon, but that now has him hunched on a barstool, attempting to douse the dread that roils in his gut. They have Lucifer, but they don’t have Cas.

Castiel, to all intents and purposes, is gone, coiled up tight in some corner of his own vessel, happy to let Lucifer pull the strings and make him dance. Dean had been stupid to think that it would be enough to just get through to him, to plead with him to come back, to let him know how important he was here, how needed. But even if Crowley hadn’t delivered his on-the-spot account of how Cas had no inclination to expel Lucifer, Dean had seen it all in that infinitesimal moment when he’d looked into Cas’s eyes and Cas, not Lucifer, had looked back – and then shuttered himself away again, Dean’s pleas all for nothing. He knows now that his friend is gone and unlikely to be coming back any time soon. 

_Cas, you fucking coward._

The hypocrisy of his accusation isn’t lost on him, so he slides off the bar stool, satisfied that he doesn’t stagger, and heads outside. The bunker isn’t far, but he allows himself one final moment of weakness, and walks rather than hailing a cab, putting off his inevitable return. The air is loamy, rich with earth and rain, and tinged with the thick smell of manure. An honest smell, his dad used to call it, when he and Sam would gag and roll up the windows of the Impala. “That smell means life, boys. Breathe it in.” Dean wonders if this year’s crops will see the harvest, and squeezes his eyes shut when the thought tries to make itself a certainty. There’s a certain relief when he can finally hide away from the outside behind the bunker’s heavy door.

The air in here is different, but no less vivid. There’s a charge to it, alive with intent, redolent with power; apparently God and an archangel make for a potent combination. Dean can almost feel each component atom, bouncing off his skin, passing through him. It’s a heady sensation and, even though the walk has sobered him, he cants sideways into the chess table, sending pieces skittering across its surface.

“Dean?” Sam’s watching him from the war room table, around which sits Chuck and… him. 

“Sammy.” He walks to the edge of the balcony, wrapping his hands around the metal rail until his bones threaten to burst through the skin. He knows that, despite his rapidly approaching sobriety, he looks like a man on the final kick of a bender. Sam’s eyebrows quirk in that familiar expression of concern, while Chuck watches him with a benevolence that makes him want to hurl. The other one doesn’t look at him at all. His head is bowed towards the table as he idly traces the lines of the map with his finger, like he’s pretending he hasn’t even registered Dean’s presence.

_Oh, I’m here, you bastard. And I’ll make sure you know it._

He clatters down the stairs, making as much noise as possible, relieved that his gait remains steady. “So, I guess we should get on with making this plan, huh? This place is getting a little too crowded for my liking.” He picks up one of the plastic marker rings from the table and frisbees it across the table towards the sack of shit who’s wearing his friend. “Hey, you. Maybe you wanna start us off? Tell us why we should vote you Prom King? I mean we did just nearly get ourselves killed rescuing you.” His voice is too loud, echoing off the high ceilings, but he can’t dial it down. There’s a blistering rage inside that he’s barely keeping locked away and he doesn’t know what’ll happen if it blows.

“D—” 

Dean silences Sam with a glare before he’s even formed his name. The thing at the end of the table raises his head. His expression is as repellent as he remembers it, the jutting jaw and insolent slant to his lips a perversion of Cas’s gentle-eyed decency. Dean tightens his jaw in an effort not to give the sonofabitch the pleasure of a reaction.

He’s assailed again by the scent of earth and wet grass, only this time it’s tainted by the acrid sting of a fire’s aftermath. He’s kneeling on a lawn in the pre-dawn light, clutching his baby brother while his father, red-eyed and desolate, talks to police and fire-crew. The morning air stinks and he’s looking at the blackened skeleton of the house he’d been sleeping in just hours before. He’s cradling Sam, and he’s looking at the wreck of the home that had kept him safe and warm, and his four-year-old heart is trying to fathom that, somewhere inside, lie the ashes of his mother.

“Dean, maybe you should sit down.” This time it’s Chuck that speaks and Dean is too far gone to tell him to fuck off.

He swallows, sickened, fighting the bile-sting that’s rising in his throat. “This is bullshit,” he mutters, and pushes himself away from the table, making it down the hall and to the bathroom just in time for the booze in his stomach to make it down the toilet.

***

Dean wakes to silence in the bunker and a hangover that’s just hovering around the base of his skull. His watch tells him it’s just after 3am, long enough for Sam to have locked Lucifer up tight in the dungeon, and for Chuck to disappear and do… whatever monotheistic deities do in the wee small hours. He shuffles barefoot from his room to the bathroom, where he splashes cold water over his face and the back of his neck, and brushes his teeth. The sight that greets him in the mirror is hollow-eyed and bleached out, with skin that’s stretched too thin. Just beneath the surface, something filthy lurks.

He craves another beer to take this edge off, but better judgement wins out and he heads to the kitchen to nuke what coffee is left in the pot. The war room is empty, the air not quite so amped as it was earlier in the day. He sets the coffee on the table and drops himself into a chair, pressing his face into his hands.

“Tiring work trying to fathom the mysteries of our great and benevolent Creator, huh?”

Dean’s on his feet in less than a second, chair crashing to the floor as he spins to face Lucifer, who saunters from the darkness of the library, a book dangling from his hand. His grip is careless, half of it held between thumb and forefinger, the remaining pages left to flap and waft in time with his movements. 

“What the hell are you doing here?”

Lucifer squints, a pretence at puzzlement. “I thought we’d established that already. Or was it too confusing for that little monkey brain of yours? Maybe you need some scene setting.” He drums his fingers on his chin. “Let me see… In the beginning, there was –”

“Shut up! I mean what are you doing here? Wandering around. How did you get out of the dungeon?”

“You mean that little sex chamber you got down there? As intrigued as I was with that, dear ol’ pops decided I was a good enough boy to stay out to play.”

“What?” 

Lucifer quirks his lips – _Cas’s_ lips – in a parody of a smile. “Yeah, I guess he trusts me not to toast your flesh on a spit. His idea of an honor system.”

Dean retreats as Lucifer approaches the table. He fights the urge to throw the steaming coffee in his face. It isn’t the threat of danger that has his guts almost punching through his flesh – the state he’s in, Lucifer could hardly make a dent – but rather it’s the fucked up nature of this entire situation, to have this aberration polluting the hallways of his home. Cas is the one who belongs here, not Lucifer; Cas is the one who should’ve been brought back. 

But something about what Lucifer says doesn’t ring true, and a theory starts to form. “Trusts you, huh?” he says with a laugh, taking some satisfaction at the side-eye Lucifer slides him. “So you’re saying it’s not that he’s put some kinda whammy on you? Left you with performance issues?”

“My performance is just fine,” says Lucifer, his voice a little too jagged. He tosses the book onto the table where it lands with pages splayed in a way that would make Sam wince. From the spine, Dean recognizes Milton. He guesses it’s something like the angelic version of Googling yourself. From Lucifer’s treatment of the text, he’s not impressed with what he’s found. His movements are listless, absent of menace, like he’s resigned to this path he’s been made to walk. 

Dean could almost be sympathetic if it wasn’t Cas’s skin and sinew he was using to manifest those feelings; every furrow etched on his brow is an offence and Dean’s had it with these small sacrileges. “You didn’t answer my question earlier,” he says, righting the chair and leaning on its back. Lucifer crooks an eyebrow. “About why we bothered pulling your ass out of the fire – if you’ll pardon the expression.”

Lucifer gives an acid smile and says, “Actually, we don’t –”

Dean waves a hand with a nonchalance he doesn’t feel, letting the memory of lightning and chains wash over him. “Yeah, I know. There’s no fire. Been there, done that, written the Tripadvisor review, remember? My point is…” He pauses and takes a breath, the enormity of Cas’s choice and its implications having lost none of its bruising impact. “…what makes you so special?”

Leaning over the table, Lucifer splays his hands across the map, light shining through the thin membrane where fingers meet palm. “Lebanon,” he murmurs, as if he hasn’t heard Dean’s question. “An auspicious name for an upstart little patch of scrub grass and cattle spit. Named for another land upon whose shores I once stood.” He draws his finger over some coastline that Dean can’t quite make out. “ _Since thou art laid down, no woodsman is come up against us._ ”

Suddenly Dean feels like an intruder, witnessing a moment weighted with the detritus of history. And his resentment multiplies, because that has no place here. Whatever beef there may be between God and his most defiant son, he doesn’t want to know. It belittles his own trauma, makes light of what he and Sam have endured. More than that, it means Cas is nothing more than an empty theater for Lucifer and God to play out their petty squabbles. He won’t have it.

“Okay, let’s cut to the chase, shall we? How soon can you do what you need to do so that we can get rid of you?”

Lucifer’s fingers pause in their travels around the map and he tilts his head to look at Dean. “And what if I don’t want to go, Winchester? What if I _like_ it here?”

“Well then, I guess I just make you leave.”

There’s a moment of silence as Lucifer contemplates him, like he’s a particularly annoying bug that escaped the fly trap. “Oh little monkey,” he says quietly. “I’d like to see you try.”

Violence is always an attractive alternative to Dean. His father taught him that it was the way to solve all problems, and the Mark of Cain gave an outlet to his existing urges, something to blame and avoid judgement. Right now, violence bleeds into his vision like a glass filled up and left to overflow. He swings for Lucifer who, unsurprisingly, is prepared for his baited trap to be sprung. He leans back, avoiding the blow, but Dean is ready with a follow up hook and his left fist sinks satisfyingly into the bastard’s stomach. He’s ready to match it with an elbow to Lucifer’s jaw, but his arm meets nothing but air, and then he finds himself grabbed by the collar of his T-shirt, swung round, and thrown against the pillar that holds up the staircase. His head rattles off the metal strut and he’s dazed for more than a moment. 

When his vision returns, he finds Lucifer leaning forward with his hands on his knees, laughing. “Ooh,” he says. “I guess that’ll teach me not to tease the animals. And here I am thinking you’ve all but given up, Dean Winchester, and the Darkness just has to reel you in. Looks like you got some spunk left in you yet, boy!”

Dean squeezes his eyes shut, leaning back against the pillar. “I haven’t given up,” he insists.

Lucifer’s laughter stops, and Dean realizes, with sickening certainty, he’s dropped a red and bloody steak into the water. “No? Well now, I guess that’s true. Because I thought that it would be little Miss Whiny McUptight who would have the problem with having me here, but it seems Sam’s A-OK with me being part of the grand plan. You however… This is killing you. What’s the difference I wonder? What’s making _you_ freak out?” Lucifer takes a step back and tilts his head, looking away as if consulting some memory. “Oh,” he says, eyebrows rising in understanding. He takes the lapels of Cas’s coat between thumb and forefinger, lifting them and looking down as if taking stock of the vessel he inhabits. “Oh, I get it.”

Dean grits his teeth, knowing that to deny it would not only be a lie, but would render it cheap through acknowledgement. He doesn’t want to play this bastard’s games, but his anger is stretched taut like a rope. It’s only a matter of time before he uses it to hang himself.

Lucifer prowls closer and Dean makes a move to circle round him, but he’s too slow and Lucifer’s hand is suddenly gripping his wrist. Whatever whammy Chuck may have put on him, apparently it doesn’t diminish angel strength. Dean’s back hits the metal pillar once more, and Lucifer raises his hands, palms out in a placating gesture. “Hey, hey, it’s alright, Dean. We’re all good here. When I say I get it, I mean I _really_ get it. I was there, y’see. Siege of Hell? The raising of the Righteous Man?” He frames that last with air quotes and the motion sends fresh pain through Dean, reminding him of Cas and his tetchy frustrations at this human world, his earnest efforts to understand it. “That cage?" continues Lucifer. "It was practically courtside. And I saw it all." For a moment his expression changes, turning inward, as if trying to fathom an impenetrable puzzle. “Of all the angels, they sent him. You were the prize, Dean. Why choose _him_ to capture the flag? Couldn’t they see how it would end? Didn’t they know?”

The temptation is too great for Dean. He has no memory of that moment, the one that changed forever what he knew of the world and the man he thought he was. He can remember every second of torture endured and inflicted, but it galls him that he’s been denied the memory of that one moment of splendor. He knows that this angel is the serpent deceiver and Father of Lies, but if he was there, if he saw…

“How…?” Dean’s voice is dry and cracked and he swallows. “How did it happen?” His eyes lock with Lucifer’s and within them he sees the turning of time, a vengeance older than Creation, a pit from which there is no deliverance. Yet beneath it all, an essence lingers, a familiar spark.

_Cas?_

“Little brother was quite fervent in his efforts to reach you,” says Lucifer. “They sent a vanguard, of course, to open the way for him, but my legion are many and Castiel still had to fight. He suffered countless wounds and yet he made it through, though his wings were a little bruised and battered. And then he found you, shivering in your chains.” The words are captivating, coming as they are from Castiel’s mouth, and Dean grasps at them, weaving them into that blank space in his soul. Lucifer’s voice has dropped low and Dean wonders if he too is transfixed by his own story. 

There’s a feather-light touch on the bone of his wrist and Dean glances down to see Lucifer’s hand encircling him like a manacle. He tries to pull away, but Lucifer’s grip is tight – but not so tight. He could move if he wanted to. “You think that it was his rebellion against Zachariah that brought about his fall? It wasn’t.” Lucifer’s hand is travelling up his arm, and Dean’s felt this touch before. These hands have both spilled his blood and healed him. But there’s something hiding just beneath the surface now, something that speaks to the primal part of him. An intrinsic link. A profound bond. 

From Lucifer’s expression, it’s like he’s hardly in the room, his gaze following the progress of his hand. “Little brother’s fall happened much earlier. He saw you, so broken and full of self-hate, and he _knew_. And then…” The hand moves to his upper arm, the fingers splayed across the scar that is faded now but will never disappear. It fits perfectly. “And then Castiel touched you and knew he was lost. For just as he marked you, in that moment, you marked him.” Lucifer’s eyes are hooded, his voice dry and grainy, and when he finally looks up…

“Dean?” 

For a second, Dean can do nothing but try and suck in the air that has suddenly left his lungs. But he knows this face, its questioning expression, the sad tilt to those eyes. “Cas?”  


  
Cas blinks, slow and sleepy, and looks at his hand caressing Dean’s scar. “Why am I –?”

But Dean doesn’t know how long this respite from Lucifer’s influence will last and he’s not letting Cas retreat without a fight – not this time. He takes his face in his hands and captures his lips with his, completing a circle that should never have been broken. Cas succumbs to the kiss without question, and then pushes forward, pressing Dean against the metal pillar once more. His hand moves from the scar, up into Dean’s shirt, grasping at his shoulder as if trying to mark him all over again. Dean would let him if they had time.

He breaks the kiss, keeping Cas’s face framed in his hands. “Cas, listen to me. I don’t know how long we’ve got. The last time I got you back, that bastard managed to tear you down again. I won’t lose you this time. I won’t let it happen.”

But Cas only smiles and dips his head for another kiss, soft, but fleeting this time. “Dean, why don’t you ever believe in me?”

“What?” Dean is incredulous. “Cas, buddy, that’s all I got for you. A big ol’ bag of belief.” A thought strikes him and he looks down with a laugh, self-conscious. “Only I guess that’s not quite true, is it? I guess there’s this now too.” He gestures between them, unsure whether to name it.

“Dean,” says Cas, with a smile that’s both wise and beautiful, “there was always this.”

Dean nods, his heart ready to bust out his chest, it’s beating so hard. “So you’ll come back? You won’t give up?”

“I will never give up. But I can’t come back.”

“What? But we –”

“Dean, have faith. In me. I have a purpose here. I have a role. I will come forth when the time is right. All I ask is that you be ready.”

Dean shakes his head, because he can feel this ending, can feel Castiel slipping away. “Cas, man, please.” The tears have already spilled over, but Cas only leans forward, kissing Dean’s cheek and then his lips. Dean tastes the salt of his own sorrow and knows he’s failed.

“Have faith, Dean,” says Cas. “I love you.” Then he bows his head and steps back, arms falling to his sides. When he looks back up, the other has returned.

“Well, that was… touching,” says Lucifer, but his tone has lost its sardonic edge and he looks shaken. He walks backwards, clenching and unclenching his fists.

“You better leave him be, you sonofabitch,” says Dean through gritted teeth.

Finally, Lucifer meets Dean’s eyes. “Your beloved is fine, Winchester,” he says, heading for the library again. “He’s apparently quite capable of looking after himself.” He stops and looks back over his shoulder. “Maybe you’re the one who should give him some credit.” And then he’s gone, swallowed by the library’s darkness, leaving Dean propped up by the pillar.

Cas is gone, Dean accepts that sow, but he feels something like renewed hope. Because the angel he just kissed is a warrior of the Lord, mighty and glorious, and believing in him in the very least Dean owes him. He has a purpose in this fight, a role to play, and when he’s done, Dean knows he’ll see him again.


End file.
